


Rattle My Sleep

by paperpenpal



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: ??I guess it’s romance?, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Mild Sexual Content, OOC, Romance, Romantic Comedy, The Rom Com AU no one asked for, Tropey as hell, don’t take it too seriously, in fact don’t take it seriously at all, is rom-com AU even a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:48:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22491070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperpenpal/pseuds/paperpenpal
Summary: Ingrid has a completely mortifying but also kind of pleasant dream about a friend.A very handsome annoying friend.But a friend.Sylvain.Damn.
Relationships: Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 23
Kudos: 156





	Rattle My Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> I originally intended to write this and post it for Valentine’s Day as a bit of a joke but then I ended up having a blast writing it so now it’s a thing.
> 
> Happy Early Valentine’s Day?

Ingrid has not had a good night’s sleep. Or, perhaps, depending on how you look at it, she had a very good night’s sleep but she can attest, with a hundred percent surety, that she certainly hasn’t had a good morning.

See, it is quite difficult to have a good morning when a person wakes up in bed halfway through a very pleasant but also completely mortifying dream about a friend.

A good friend.

A friend, who, in her dream, had his very nice and surprisingly soft hands placed in very specific places of her body that she thoroughly enjoyed.

In her dream.

A friend she has known her entire life.

A friend that had her wake with a gasp and his name on her lips, an inch away from his.

In her dream.

A friend who is currently approaching her in the hallway as she leaves her room to start towards breakfast in hopes that eating something would improve the morning she had shaking the dream away in her room. A friend who is smiling at her and greeting her and casually throwing his arm around her shoulder and because (only because) of the residual effects of her dream, Ingrid can feel her body start to flush so she quickly shoves his arm off and stalks ahead so she doesn’t have to look at him.

“Woah, someone’s cranky today,” he says.

She almost punches him.

But that would be quite unfair considering he hasn’t actually done anything. No, every wonderful thing he did only happened in her head, and that was perhaps the worst part of it all.

So Ingrid doesn’t punch him, instead, she huffs a tense but resigned, “good morning Sylvain,” as they make off towards the dining hall.

—

Ingrid always has an appetite, except today of course, because she somehow finds herself sitting directly across from Sylvain as he rambles about something or other. Probably a date, which is absolutely the last thing she wants to hear about.

Felix, as usual, says very little, as he is not a morning person - or an anytime person really, and Ingrid has no energy today to berate or lecture Sylvain. After all, she had a very...difficult night’s sleep. So she only hums and mumbles half-replies in his general direction. She finds it is very hard to look at him and it has nothing to do with the way her mind recalls him looming over her, his lips at her neck.

Because that didn’t actually happen.

So of course, it has nothing to do with that.

“Are you guys even listening?” Sylvain asks, interrupting his own story, sounding only a little bit frustrated.

Felix simply replies truthfully, as he always does. “No,” he says immediately, forking eggs into his mouth and not looking at either of them. He is, no doubt, going over sword drills in his head.

“Hmm?” Ingrid can only reply, glancing up at Sylvain’s offended face for exactly a fraction of a second before turning away.

She should have sat with the girls.

“Unbelievable!” Sylvian cries in mock outrage, but then his tone shifts into concern and that somehow shoots a shock of adrenaline through her body, as if she were in some terrible life-threatening situation, but only for a fraction of a second.

“Hey Ingrid,” he says, sounding sincere. “Are you okay? You haven’t touched your breakfast.”

She realizes her mistake then. Being this close to Sylvain has her distracted and morose and anyone would be able to tell that she’s out of sorts. She absolutely does not want to talk about it.

“I’m fine!” she says, a little too loudly, loud enough for Dimitri and Dedue to glance over at them, and in a very poor attempt to prove it, Ingrid quickly shovels the entire contents of her breakfast into her mouth in the most unattractive way possible and darts out the door with a quick and flimsy excuse. “Uh, I just remembered I had to return a book to the library before class, I’ll see you guys later!”

Except, since she hadn’t bothered to finish chewing, she’s not entirely sure how much of her excuse is intelligible but it’s too late, she’s already out the door.

She resolves to channel her inner Bernadetta and spend the rest of the day avoiding Sylvain, or, you know, however long it takes to shake the dream out of her system.

—

As luck would have it, Ingrid is paired up with Sylvain for almost every single partner exercise of the day, of which there are many. This would annoy her on any normal day. Sylvain has a habit of being very lackadaisical about his work despite actually being quite talented. She wishes, whenever she sees him, that he would not squander it all away. After all, he’s brilliant when he applies himself. He just never applies himself in anything that matters, instead, he applies himself in other ways.

In annoying ways.

In annoying ways that involved women.

And the most annoying part is that she is not exempt from this either.

“Hey Ingrid!” he says when they are paired up for a sparring session after they had already been paired up for a number of group question and answer worksheets that she doesn’t entirely remember filling out. “Guess I just can’t get enough of you today.”

She does not reply, instead, she tries to think about the best place on his body to ram her training lance into.

Normally, Sylvain actually does stand a chance, but today, he finds himself woefully unmatched for the residual restless energy that Ingrid unleashes on him. He is underneath her with her boot on his chest in a few seconds.

He does not seem to mind, instead, he makes a particularly uncreative joke that nearly stagers her, causing lance to slip a centimeter closer to his chest.

“Woah,” he starts, breathing heavily from having been quickly thrown, his mouth quirks into a boyish grin. “I love it when a beautiful woman is on top of me”

It is almost the exact same joke the dream version of him made in one of several intimate positions they had been in.

She stifles a frustrated groan and jumps off of him, forgetting to offer him a hand up.

—

Here’s what she hates about the dream. It is not the contents. She is a healthy young woman. Such things are natural. It is not necessarily even the subject - Sylvain - well she has long acknowledged his handsomeness, even when she adamantly refuses to admit it out loud.

It is how it distracts her.

Distracts her so much that she finds herself uncharacteristically unable to concentrate while flying, which is always dangerous, even when nothing flies at her.

It just so happens, from her vantage point in the skies, the shock of red hair draws her eye at just the right time to miss the way a training spear flies towards her, and it just so happens that the man with the shock of red hair is in the midst of charming some poor unsuspecting woman, and her indignation (for the woman of course) has her heartbeat drum in her ears so loudly she is unable to hear Ashe’s shout of warning, too distracted to move out of the way for said training spear.

And it just so happens that her grip slips and she ends up falling towards the ground, off her mount, which she has not done since the early days when she first learned to fly, and onto her elbow with a sickening crack.

—

The next thing that happens is a comedy of errors so absurd no one could have possibly predicted it.

In her embarrassment and because of her pride, Ingrid somehow manages to convince everyone that Mercedes can look her over in her own room.

Nevermind the fact that her elbow is clearly broken.

“Your elbow is broken,” Mercedes says kindly, as she sets Ingrid on her bed and pulls over a desk chair. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be in the infirmary?”

Ingrid has decided at this point that there is nowhere she can be for the rest of her day other than her room. She is truly channeling Bernadetta here. The day is a wash. She has learned nothing and will likely continue to learn nothing. She would rather learn nothing in the privacy of her own bedroom than fussed after by Professor Manuela who would almost certainly lament her last disastrous date to a person only listening because they cannot leave.

“No, it’s fine.” Ingrid waves with her free, unbroken arm, but even this somehow hurts.

Mercedes, who is often very forgiving and kind, gives her a sharp look that says she clearly disapproves so Ingrid tries a different, admittedly underhanded, approach that she would normally never employ.

“I trust you,” Ingrid says to her friend.

It is not untrue. She genuinely trusts Mercedes.

She can also see that Mercedes can see right through her. It shows on her face but mercifully, as if sensing there is something more to it that Ingrid does not want to get into, Mercedes says nothing. Instead, she nods and begins to cast.

The magic ebbs the worst the pain away instantly, her arm, which had been bent in a very odd and unnatural position starts to look less like a bizarre tree branch and soon, she is able to move her fingers.

Sort of. It still kind of hurts.

“You shouldn’t move it too much for a few days,” Mercedes says, because, although magic is amazing and, well, magical, there are still limits.

Mercedes gets up, and moves to find a clean shirt for Ingrid because the one she had discarded in order for Mercedes to properly examine her is currently covered in blood. It looks a lot more ghastly than it actually is.

Ingrid works to clean her arm with a rag that her friend had the foresight to bring with her.

Then, she hears it, a tumbling down the hallway, muffled raised voices and heavy footsteps. She would have heard it earlier had she not been distracted by how much her broken elbow hurt. Honestly, it was a miracle that she hadn’t passed out from the pain.

A miracle aided by pure stubbornness.

It still hurts but it no longer makes her feel like she has to pretend to be brave to save a little face.

She hears someone frantically and aggressively shout “Is she okay?” before the door bangs open and several bodies tumble on top of each other in a tangle of limbs and slam onto her bedroom floor.

For a moment, all chatter and movement cease. Instead, Ingrid finds herself staring at her pile of her (stupid, idiotic, overprotective) childhood friends.

The frantic voice had been Dimitri’s and he now lays sandwiched between Sylvain, who had thrown the door open, and Felix who had been the one to charge into the room and trip the three. From the doorway, she can see Dedue’s white hair quickly snap back and out of sight.

Sylvain groans, he had somehow ended up face down with his nose to the floorboard, he lifts his head and is halfway through a long and drawn-out “ow” when he abruptly stops as he registers Ingrid.

Normally, Ingrid would probably be touched by the concern, but right now, she is absolutely completely mortified because she is half-naked in front of three men and one of them is staring directly at her.

“Out!” A shrill and very angry voice shouts, and it takes Ingrid a second to register that it’s Mercedes, who has her hands on her hips and is glaring at the pile of men in a way that made Ingrid very glad she is not the recipient of it.

She will have to ask Mercedes to teach her that particular look someday.

Felix recovers first and, without a single word, he bounces up, darting out the door. It would almost be graceful were it not for the way he flushes all the way down his neck.

Dimitri is not so graceful, he quickly stands up and stammers, eyes staring straight down at Sylvain’s back, who is still lying there, stunned and opened mouth, staring at Ingrid.

“Erm- we just-ah, we wanted to see if-uh, sorry, shouldn’t have-“

The more Dimitri stammers, and His Highness hardly ever stammers, the more her mortification grows and the more she remembers that Dimitri is not only her friend but her _prince_ and he has now seen her half-naked.

Mercedes, ever the saint, saves them all - again.

“Out!” she commands, not caring of anyone’s regal status.

This resets Dimitri. “Right!” he says quickly turning and exiting, even his hands are red. “So sorry about that.”

Then there is only Sylvain who still has not moved.

His shock slowly falls away, his mouth closing, and it isn’t until he’s about to open it again that both girls scream at the same time.

“OUT!”

Sylvain bolts.

—

She cannot tell if it’s worse to hide or to show her face. If she hides in her bedroom all night, then she is admitting that she is embarrassed. Which she is, she is horribly _horribly_ embarrassed.

But she also knows that they will never ever talk about it, so she could, in theory, go to dinner and pretend it never happened.

Except for Sylvain, who would almost certainly make a poor joke about it to remind them. Sylvain is a problem. He has been a problem all day.

It’s really truly frustrating.

In more ways than one.

In the end, Ingrid ends up fretting for far too long, letting time stretch and trying desperately to forget the events of the day and the non-events of the night before.

Mercedes is able to ward off any visitors, citing Ingrid’s need to rest and heal. She could even hear her turning away Annette, whom, in truth, Ingrid would have liked to see. It would be better than rolling around her head in solitude letting strange thoughts creep up on her.

She is attracted to Sylvain.

Or perhaps, she is simply attracted to the dream version of him. The dream version that looked exactly like him, or at least, shared his face and voice and upper body (she _has_ seen him without a shirt) because it is not like she has actually seen him fully nude. Her imagination had filled that part out. And filled it quite well, she might add.

She shakes the image of a non-real naked Sylvain out of her head and instead focuses on her stomach.

She is quite hungry and still hasn’t decided whether or not to take dinner. She wants to eat but she is also not quite ready to see the real, non-naked, Sylvain yet. Perhaps she can wait until everyone goes to bed before venturing out for a snack.

There’s a hard rapt at her door that has her sitting up from her bed.

She almost pretends not to hear it, or tells it to go away, citing her need to rest but she smells food on the other side.

In the end, her stomach decides for her and she opens the door to find herself face to face with the real, non-naked Sylvain and a tray of food.

“Peace-offering?”

He wears a sheepish smile on his face and the food he offers is warm and inviting.

She likes this smile on him. This genuine smile that isn’t trying to be charming. It is a sincere smile that’s boyish and cute.

Okay, so she is attracted to Sylvain. Damn.

She focuses on the food instead, it’s stacked to the brim with meat and more meat. He knows her very well. She considers taking the tray and shoving him out the door but her arm still hurts and there’s a lot of food on the plate. She sighs and lets him in.

And is immediately bombarded with the image of him in her room, on her bed, and his hands running all over her.

She almost hurls him out the door.

Instead, her eyes drift to his hands, which is a decidedly bad idea, as he places the food on her desk.

When he turns, she is no longer looking at him or the food, instead, she has crossed her good arm over her chest to brace against her sore elbow and stares directly at her shoes.

“How’s the arm?” he asks, concerned.

“A little sore,” she admits. She is very glad for magic or else it would take forever to heal and she would fall behind on her studies. Her bone had actually been quite broken. She probably should have gone to the infirmary. Thank the Goddess for Mercedes. “Mercedes told the Professor I shouldn’t put too much strain on it for a few days so I’m not allowed to train with it.”

He lets out a small and short laugh. “I’m sure you took that well.”

Ingrid shrugs. She is acting quite odd today, normally she would deny it and fire back but Sylvain in her room has the air very thin for some reason. She can feel a blush begin to creep into her cheeks. She refuses to look at him.

“You’ve been acting weird all day, is everything okay?” She sees him shift in her peripheral and somehow he ends up very close to her, she takes the tiniest step back and finds that she has not moved from the door. The back of her shoes meet the wood, “You look kind of flushed,”

Without warning, Sylvain places a hand on her forehead. Ingrid didn’t think she could go redder but she had clearly been wrong.

Her breathing hitches.

Because of their closeness, Sylvain catches it.

She can see, out of the corner of her eye, because she still can’t look at him, a smirk form.

“Is it because of me?”

She goes to deny it, but her tongue does not twist right and a bunch of incoherent babbling comes out. She sounds not unlike His Highness from a few hours ago.

“Holy-It is! It is because of me!”

He reels back, his hand is mercifully no longer touching her, but she finds, bizarrely, that wishes that he hadn’t taken it away.

“Sylvain,” she tries, but her voice comes out quieter than she wants it to. She’ll try to blame it on the medicine. She finally looks at him. This turns out to be a mistake.

Because now, Sylvain is looking at her with the smuggest expression she has ever seen on anybody and a devilish smirk that goes straight to her core and causes her to shift uncomfortably and tells her that this encounter is rapidly veering off into some place new and unpredictable.

She doesn’t like unpredictable but Ingrid has always been adaptable so she can deal with it. What she doesn’t want to deal with is the idea that Sylvain will now become insufferable.

“You think I’m hot!” he accuses with a grin. He is near her again.

She shakes her head vigorously. “No, I don’t,” she tries weakly but she has always been a terrible liar which is why she is often exceptionally honest.

“You totally do.” His grin never fades away. He places a single arm above and behind her, bracing it against the door. He is the tiniest step closer to her, but he tilts his body towards the side so that she could move out from underneath him if she wanted to and even if he hadn’t, she could still probably level him, healing elbow or no.

But she finds that she does not have the instinct to duck under him. Instead, her breathing is very shallow.

Something changes then. His playfulness disappears, instead, something happens to his demeanor, a powerful shift in his body language that changes his entire appearance. He is no longer poking fun.

He is taller than her so he has to lean down to whisper in her ear, “You do,” he insists. “If it helps, I find you pretty hot too.”

He says it with absolutely no shame. She has no idea how he can say things like that so easily, how he has always been able to say things like that.

She has no idea why she reacts the way she does, his confession sending a very pleasant shiver down her, and when he pulls back so that she can see his face, she sees that his eyes are dark, darker than she has ever seen him. He leans very close to her, she can feel his breath on hers, just as shallow.

“If you want me to stop. I will,” he whispers and waits.

There is a heartbeat between them. The room and her entire body is very hot, and already, despite nothing having happened, she is buzzing with a very pleasant warmth.

One of her hands, on its own accord, reaches out to his neck to yank him down towards her, even though they were hardly an inch apart, her teeth bump against his in her haste. She will admit later, that she might have been a little too aggressive in this endeavor to meet his lips to hers.

One of his hands immediately grips her waist to push her deep against the door with an audible thump as the rest of his body presses against her. Her eyes automatically fall closed and somewhere, in the back of her head, she thinks that her imagination is actually quite accurate. His other hand is deep in her hair, pulling her braid apart.

Sylvain is a little aggressive too, it seems. He is also an exceptionally good kisser.

Her hands begin to roam his hair, his neck, his torso- any part of her she can touch and she has somehow managed to shrug his jacket off his shoulders when she winces and has to break away from the kiss.

He pulls his head back when she does to look at her, concerned. His breathing is very labored, his jacket sleeves are at his elbows, he looks very disheveled and ridiculous. For a moment, she thinks about how funny it would be to throw him out in the hall like this but finds that it is the absolute last thing she wants to do.

“Arm,” she explains hastily, before tugging him back to her. ‘’s fine.”

“You sure?” he says, but he’s already let the rest of his jacket fall to the floor. She quickly begins working at the buttons of his shirt, ignoring the residual soreness. “We can stop if you-“

“No,” she says. It is probably the clearest she has been all day with anybody, let alone him.

The grin is back. It’s the smug one again. It’s this that makes her hands still, a warning.

“Don’t-“ she tells him. He no doubt has some halfway clever quip prepared.

“Don’t?” he tilts his head, looking puzzled. “Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re about to say,” Ingrid explains. “Don’t. It’ll ruin the mood.”

“Oh, there’s a mood now?”

She knew he would be insufferable.

She sighs and pulls him back towards her again by his shirt, if only to get him to stop talking.

He doesn’t seem to mind as evidenced by how readily he meets her lips.

—

Ingrid wakes to the sun peeking into her bedroom as usual. She is typically a very early riser, often one of the first to wake in the morning. She likes the mornings, usually, when she is not in a frantic panic over something going on in her head.

Today, unlike yesterday, she is not in a frantic panic over something going on in her head. She is, instead, in a frantic panic over the someone next to her in bed. Someone who is wearing absolutely no clothing, which she only knows because she is also wearing no clothing, and whose heavy arm is wrapped around her waist and legs are tangled around hers.

She realizes that she is sleeping on her bad arm, realizes when she tries to move and a sharp throb of pain crawls up to her shoulder.

“Sylvain!” she hisses, pushing against him but he is heavy and much bigger than her. Something she never paid much attention to until now.

He grumbles something and only buries his head deeper into her shoulder. “Sylvain,” she tries again, twisting in his arms. “Get up!”

This time he blinks awake. “Ingrid?” he says groggily. “What are you doing in my bed?”

He hasn’t seemed to registered how intimately they are held together.

She sees the exact moment it does, sees when he sits up, blinks around the dim morning light dancing into the room and starts to give her a lazy smile.

“It’s my bed,” she tells him, despite not needing to, pushing him off fully and sitting up. “And you need to go before someone sees you.”

He frowns a deep frown and looks suddenly wounded.

Ingrid backpedals. “It’s not that,” she tells him, annoyed, pulling the sheets up with her to cover up, even though there’s really no need to anymore. “We’re just going to get in a lot of trouble if someone catches you in here and Mercedes said she’d check on me in the morning. It’s morning! Get your clothes on.”

This finally kickstarts Sylvain and Ingrid watches as he frantically hops up and nearly trips off the bed, scrambling over her as he roots around the room for pieces of his discarded uniform.

“So uh,” he says, whispering loud enough to the point that it renders whispering moot as he throws his shirt on, not bothering with his buttons. “Last night-“

“You want to do this _now_?” she asks as quietly as she can while pointing to his trousers which had somehow ended up on her chair, next to the desk and untouched food.

As if proving her point, they hear a door close from down the hall, one of the early risers in the dormitories.

This spurs Ingrid to get up too and she quickly pulls her drawer open for clean non-disheveled looking clothing to dress herself in in case someone comes by. She could probably come up with some excuse for why Sylvain is in the room if it had to come to that, or he would, he was much better at that than her.

Sylvain ignores her and barrels on, tugging on his pants. “Well, I was thinking- I know this is kind of backwards but do you wanna go on a date maybe? Maybe the next free day-“

“You _are_ doing this now,” she groans, walking towards the door to press her ear to it. She shushes him so that she can listen.

He quiets behind her, suddenly very close to her again.

“I just want to make sure this isn’t a one time thing,” he says, voice low, and then he adds, “...Is it a one time thing?”

Ingrid spins, catching his eye. He shifts nervously, a far cry from how confident, smooth, and playful he had been last night. She finds him very endearing with his bed head and uniform halfway straight. She probably looks just as much of a mess.

“It’s not,” she assures, reaching up to give him a soft lingering kiss. This one is different from all the ones they shared last night, it is slow and warm, and she can feel a slow creeping smile form on his face before she breaks away.

He looks dazed and giddy.

He will be absolutely insufferable today. She can tell already.

Another sound from the hallway, voices this time. They both freeze for a second and wait until the sound disappears down the hallway.

“We can talk about this more later,” she tells him, tossing his jacket from the floor at him before pulling the door open to peek her head in both directions. There is no one in the hallway so she shoves Sylvain out of her room while she still has the chance.

Sylvain stumbles for a second before catching his footing and turning around, he opens his mouth to say something before she glares him down.

“Later,” she says sternly. “Go!”

He finally listens and she watches him dash to his room and enters, but not before throwing her a grin from across the hall.

She finds now, leaning against her now closed door and breathing in steady breaths to help her process, that this morning was not as bad as the previous one. The night was also much better.

As it turns out, her imagination, although very good, does not even come close to the real thing.

Her arm still hurts though.


End file.
